Social TV has been increasing in popularity over the last few years. Social TV is the combination of television and social media, with people communicating with each other over communications networks while watching a TV show or video on demand (VoD) stream. Social TV allows users to have the experience of chatting to a friend while watching TV without the need to be in the same physical location.
Many new “smart TVs” now include communications (e.g. VOIP) clients in their TV sets, and other devices such as video game consoles and media centres support communications services in parallel with video streaming. Currently, there is little integration between the communications services and the video stream—the two applications run separately, sharing space on the screen, but with no interaction between the services. For example, a user of the Xbox One™ video games console can watch a video stream while engaging in a video call with another user via Skype™ but there is no mechanism for ensuring that the video stream is synchronised for both users. This leads to undesirable situations such as hearing a friend's reaction to a goal in a football game before seeing the goal being scored. It also requires careful timing if you wish to watch content delivered by unicast streams with a friend, especially since differing download rates may cause your device to take longer to buffer the content than your friend's device. These problems are made worse when attempting to coordinate more than two people for a social TV experience.
Previous attempts have been made to coordinate voice services and VoD services, for example “Network implemented PVR and chase-play combined with IMS services”—WO2007/101473, but these have been focussed on use cases where only a single user is watching the VoD stream, or focussed on closer integration of IPTV services within the network used for voice calling (e.g. IMS integration of IPTV services).